Day 2904

I can't resist taking a picture of Dash next to a fire truck. I have no idea who was being carried out on a stretcher, but it happens a lot in our neighborhood. We're all getting older.

We had our own medical emergency last night. Dash experienced a severe vestibular event and we were up half the night with him. In the past we have taken him to the emergency room when he has one of these episodes, but there is little if anything the vets can do. Now that we recognize the symptoms, we just try to keep him calm and ride it out. The vestibular episodes almost always start the same way. Dash will wake up during the night after sleeping calmly. Usually we will immediately notice that he is drooling. Since drooling is sometimes a precursor to throwing up, I'll take him outside. If he doesn't throw up and seems disoriented and unsteady on his feet, it is often the start of a vestibular seizure. Dash drooled a river last night and was very agitated for about an hour. When he started to calm down, we got him to lay down on a rug in the living room and I curled up next to him. I could tell his breathing was becoming more regular and in about fifteen minutes he fell asleep. I stayed with him until the drooling completely stopped and he seemed normal again. Then I eventually went back to bed. Later that night, Dash woke up and came back to bed with us. He was fine. I was tired the next morning though. I didn't get much sleep.

Vestibular disease is scary, because there is so little you can do. We keep a supply of anti-nausea pills on hand in case he shows signs of vertigo, but the pills don't take effect immediately. The main benefit of the Cerenia pills is if the vestibular events last for several days. The last time we experienced an event this bad was during the summer. Today Dash was completely normal. He ate well and took both of his regular walks. The vestibular disease never really goes away, but episodes like Dash experienced last night are infrequent. We've got enough to worry about with his heart problems. I hope he doesn't have another seizure for many months.

The weather was chilly again today, but there was no rain. I didn't go anywhere because I wasn't completely sure if Dash was back to normal yet. I'd hate for him to have a seizure when I wasn't there. There was plenty to do around the house. I returned to work on my website project and made a lot of progress. I think last night really tired Dash out because he slept a lot today. I always let sleeping dogs lie. It's the only way I get anything done. The website is looking pretty good now. I'm just about ready to turn it over to the client.

I had to renew a domain today and had a real problem turning off the auto-renew feature on my account dashboard. I hate auto-renew because very often I don't want to renew something again. At any rate, when I renewed the domain, my credit card information got captured by the website and all of the sudden I was a perpetual customer again. Damn. It took sitting on hold with tech support for almost an hour before I was able to talk with someone and get the problem resolved. A word of warning. If you sign up for Sirius XM radio, don't ever check the box that lets them auto-renew your subscription. They make it so difficult to leave that you're practically a customer for life.

I'm hoping I can finish the website tomorrow. I'm also hoping that Dash is back to normal. Sometimes the vertigo can last for several days. We gave him another Cerenia pill to help him sleep calmly tonight. I won't need a pill to get to sleep. I'm so tired that I'm falling asleep right now.

Emma is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2367

I moved the domains I own to a new registrar today. I'd been planning to do this for quite a while, but kept postponing the task because of the hassle I anticipated. Basically it was now or never. Several of the domains needed to be renewed soon, and if I renewed them at the old registrar, I would have to wait at least 60 days before I would be able to transfer them. The move was just as problematic as I feared. For starters, I couldn't remember the password to my old account. There are all kinds of safeguards to prevent domains from being hijacked, so I had to get permission from the old registrar to move the domains and then the new registrar had to verify the move to prove that I was really who I said I was. To make matters worse, there was no way to automate the process. I had to go through the complicated transfer process on a case by case basis for each domain. Luckily, I had nothing better to do today, because the process took a long time.

I didn't sleep well last night. Dot pooped in her bed twice and seemed unusually lethargic when I woke up this morning. I always worry when Dot's condition seems to change, but she seemed to bounce back after breakfast and by the time the dog walker arrived for our morning walk, she seemed fine again. Maybe I should be more worried about myself than the dogs. I have been unusually clumsy lately. I drop things all the time, which I never used to do. Yesterday, I dropped a Corningware cooking dish and broke it while I was trying to get some utensils out of a kitchen cabinet. Today, when I was eating breakfast, the glass with my fruit smoothie literally fell out of my hand while I was drinking it. The glass didn't break, but I did make a big mess. I never used to be this clumsy. I also inadvertently stepped on Dash's foot while I was walking him this afternoon. Dash wasn't hurt, but we both were startled. I wonder if this had anything to do with not being able to use the treadmill at the gym without using the handrails. Most of the other people never use the handrails, but I always do. Maybe something is going wrong with my balance and coordination. On the other hand, maybe I'm just being a hypochondriac.

After I successfully transferred all my domains, I decided to fix my voter registration online. For some reason now, the information on your voter registration card needs to match the information on your drivers license exactly. I has used my full middle name on one and a middle initial on the other. I got a letter last week saying that if I didn't fix this, I would be given a provisional ballot the next time I went to vote. This kind of scrutiny seemed a lot like making my 80 year old father take his shoes off for the TSA folks at the airport, but I learned a long time ago that it is pointless to argue with bureaucracy. I filled out the online form, which involved providing them with a lot of identifying information that I didn't even know belonged to me. When you look at your driver's license with a magnifying glass, there is a lot more information than you might think.

I'll be glad when Janet gets back. Dealing with the dogs when I first wake up is like herding cats. Dot and Dash have different agendas and are never where I need them to be. Dash sometimes wakes up with an upset stomach, and will race outside and eat grass and leaves if you don't watch him like a hawk. If I see him eating leaves, but am holding on to Dot's harness at the same time, it is hard to get him to stop. I could always let the dogs out one at a time, but they both need to pee as soon as they get up. Of course, I always need to pee as soon as I get up too, so it gets complicated.

All in all, we are doing pretty well. The soiled area rugs are clean again and back on the living room floor. I found a new kibble combination that Dash seems to like for breakfast. I'm still having problems getting Dot to pee just before bedtime, but we're working on it.  Hopefully, I'll be able to get Dot down to her physical therapy session tomorrow without another messy accident in the car. We'll see.

Domino is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 799

Here's why I hate computers. I get this e-mail from Quark Express about a month ago telling me not to upgrade to OS 10.7.3 yet, because it was not compatible with Quark. I dutifully go to my control panel and deselect the automatic upgrade option. Several weeks go by and one morning when I start up my computer I get a dialog box asking if I'd like to upgrade to OS 10.7.3. By this time, I've completely forgotten about the earlier message from Quark, so I just click "yes" and the upgrade is installed. About an hour later a client says they need a reprint of a poster I did for them last year. I click on the Quark application so I can print the file, and you guessed it, the application doesn't work anymore, just like Quark warned me. Very frustrating, to say the least!

My Quark Express is toast. I finally figure out how to print the poster my client wants from an old PDF file and then halfway through the printing process, I run out of ink. I drive over to the printer store and buy $150 worth of ink, just so I can make a single courtesy print of an old poster I'd completely forgotten about.

Talking with tech support at Quark while trying in vain to revive my ailing application wasted several hours this morning. Talking with Network Solutions to help another client move one of their domains to a less expensive registrar ate up even more time. Evidently my name was listed as the technical contact for this domain, but it didn't show up in the list of domains I manage. I must have created an account for the domain years ago and then totally forgotten about it. The client forgot too, because no website was ever developed for this domain. Since I couldn't figure out how to log-in to the control panel of the mystery account I have created, I had to convince Network Solutions that I really was who I said I was and get them to make the changes for me. Maybe we should have just let the domain expire. It will probably still sit around unused for another five years.

For some reason Dot didn't want to go to class tonight. She refused to get out of the car and glued herself to the back seat, just like she does when we take her for a bath. She wouldn't budge. I finally had to get in the car and carry her out. Once she was out with the other dogs, she did just fine, but she clearly would have rather stayed home this evening. I can't figure out why she balked tonight. It was really one of the nicest evenings we've had all Winter. Even after dark, the temperature was still over 70 degrees.

A large printing company that used to send me lot of annual report writing work finally responded to my query. Apparently, all their customers are writing their annual report copy themselves this year. Why am I not surprised?

Maggie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 420

Learning something new can often be slow and tedious. For me, tackling something I don't really understand usually involves searching fourteen different variations of "why won't this work?" on Google and seeing if I can glean anything useful from the poor fools who tried to learn the same thing ahead of me. Today I did a test run of my new WiFi photo transfer system and learned that it is basically useless. The WiFi card actually works fine and transfers files flawlessly to a nearby computer. The unexpected problem is that it is so darn slow that you could never use it in an environment where you are taking hundreds of images an hour. I guess I could have learned this ahead of time by reading all the discussions about this subject floating around on photography forums and user groups. That's not the way guys do things though. We typically buy something first and then figure out through trial and error if it is a piece of junk. At least I didn't destroy my camera. About thirty minutes after I put the card in the camera and started shooting, I found a long list of cameras on the Eye-Fi website, along with a warning that your camera could be ruined if you tried to insert the card. Luckily, my camera wasn't on the list.

I remembered today that I'd accidentally let one of my domain names expire. I wish I'd remembered this two months ago when it actually did expire. This was a domain that I had thought would be valuable to me at some point. Apparently, it's not all that valuable. Two and a half months after I let the domain expire, it was still available. Nobody wanted it. Chagrined, but unbeaten, I renewed the domain and made a mental note to keep better track of these things in the future.

It's supposed to start snowing again tonight sometime after midnight. I don't hate snow or anything, but all I can think about at the moment is that all the time and energy I spent cleaning the ice off the roof recently has totally gone to waste. If we get freezing rain followed by snow, as they're predicting, I'm going to be up on the roof later this week doing the whole cleanup process all over again.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day